Tag: USA

Milblog Project

Voice-Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops, known as Valour IT, tries to help wounded American soldiers psychologically recover from battle by blogging. Regardless (or irregardless if you’re Dubya Bush), of what you think of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Terror, humans who are injured still need support to heal their wounds. You can read about the success the program has had at the MediaShift blog at PBS.

“It started last year when Army Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss injured both his hands and wanted to get back to blogging. His blog readers pitched in for Dragon Naturally Speaking software, and he and another blogger, FbL, put together Valour-IT and have raised more than $330,000 with two online Veteran’s Day fundraisers fueled by milbloggers.”

Americans Want 40mpg

A new study by the Opinion Research Corporation has found that 78% of Americans want a 40mpg fuel legislation. LeftLaneNews has the story on the survey results.

“A bipartisan 78 percent of Americans want the U.S. government to impose a 40 mile per gallon fuel-efficiency standard for vehicles sold in the United States, according to a new Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) national opinion survey. The report indicates nine out of 10 Americans expect gas prices to go up “in the near future,” with nearly half (46 percent) “definitely” expecting a resumption of higher fuel prices.”

The comments at LeftLaneNews break down into some sort of flame war proclaiming that lower mpg seems to be better. I just skimmed the comments so maybe there are some gems in their. One person made a comment mentioning that he doesn’t want the government telling him what mpg is acceptable.

Salt Lake City to use Waste Power

Salt Lake City is going to start a small pilot project that will use sewage to heat and cool buildings. The idea uses the simple concept of heat transfer to transfer energy from one source to another.

“The system should sufficiently heat and cool Lear’s 8,000-square-foot building about 95 percent of the time. For the remainder, Lear will pool 1,800 gallons of water in the basement, also using the water to irrigate the building’s lawn.

It’s a bit expensive – the system costs $20,000 more than traditional systems – but if it works well, Lear hopes it could be eventually used by the masses.”

Gender Bender in NYC

New York City is moving ahead with a proposed change in the rules of birth certificates. After much campaigning from activists who argue that gender is not merely physical, NYC will soon start letting people change their gender on their birth certificates (NYT link, to bypass registration try bugmenot). Reader mkb also points out this article .

Once it’s approved people will no longer have to have sex-change surgery to proclaim what gender they are.

“If approved, the new rule would put New York at the forefront of efforts to redefine gender. A handful of states do not require surgery for such birth certificate changes, but in some of those cases patients are still not allowed to make the change without showing a physiological shift to the opposite gender.”

Thanks, mkb!

AIDS Fighting AIDS

A new, but very small, study has found that AIDS can be used to fight AIDS like a vaccine. The US experimenters used gene therapy techniques to tackle AIDS in the five test patients. The results are promising and “hint at something much more,” according to Dr. Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

The article points out in the second paragraph that AIDS has no cure, something that many articles fail to do when talking about proposed new ‘cures’ for HIV/AIDS. So that acknowledgment is good, because there is (for some bizarre reason) people who think that HIV/AIDS can be cured. This article talks about fighting AIDS, and in doing so also fights ignorance.